Is Canada creating a new political realignment, which looks an awful lot like the old one? Is it returning to a three-party system in which the Conservatives and the Liberals hold power, alternating with each other, while the New Democrats languish on the margins? Perhaps.
What is striking about the resiliency of the Liberals under Justin Trudeau is less their lead over the Conservatives, which may or may not hold up through the next election. It is their lead over the New Democrats, who have fallen from second to third place.
Looking at polls, you could think we have returned to the way things were in Canada before we elected a multi-party Parliament in 1993, when the Reform party and the Bloc Québécois erupted as regional powers.
Now we have become essentially a three-party country again (the Greens and BQ notwithstanding). While they may shift positions with each other, the story is about the Liberals and Conservatives. What has not changed much in recent months is the growing marginalization of the New Democrats. It may be that this fall from grace is temporary, reflecting Trudeau’s highly publicized arrival.
But you have to think the New Democrats are worried with the emerging narrative.
Their leader, Tom Mulcair, promised to ignore Justin Trudeau; it was Stephen Harper he would attack. Yet there was Mulcair, at the party’s recent caucus in Saskatchewan, talking ill of Trudeau. It appears that he doesn’t think much of the guy, who strikes him as an arriviste and a dilettante. When I was his age, Mulcair sniffs, why, I’d been a lawyer and an elected politician! “Nobody gave me anything!” he says.
In 2011, the New Democrats could imagine themselves as the old Liberals, politically speaking. They became the official Opposition for the first time in their history. They saw themselves as the government-in-waiting. They were legitimate. They had arrived.
In choosing Mulcair to succeed the sainted Jack Layton, they chose a Quebecer who could consolidate their new support in the province. It seemed smart.
But Mulcair has gained little traction in public opinion, and the Liberals are now threatening to take those seats. Trudeau’s early and emphatic denunciation of Quebec’s proposed charter of values — before Mulcair and Harper — has given him stature, which he needs.
Two years before the next election, few Canadians seriously imagine the New Democrats in power. Indeed, they see the NDP as a useful third party — social democratic, principled, conscientious — more suited to opposition than government.
So it was for the NDP before 2011.
The Liberals and the Conservatives governed the country. The New Democrats proposed ideas — medicare, pensions and unemployment insurance — and kept Liberals and Tories honest. Some ideas were so attractive that the Liberals stole them.
In election after election, the NDP reliably got 16 to 19 per cent of the vote. Under Ed Broadbent, the party hit 20.3 per cent in 1988, but fell to 6.8 per cent in 1993 under Audrey McLaughlin. In 2011, the New Democrats surprised themselves with 30.6 per cent.
This is looking more like an aberration than a realignment.
The good news for the New Democrats is that they are polling well above their historic levels of support. The bad news is they are still far behind the Liberals.
Today, we are governed by the politics of personality. Experience matters less than character. The Liberals chose smart but weak leaders in 2008 and 2011. Trudeau may not have the same intellect as his predecessors, but he has a winning temperament. He is a master of retail politics who has yet to put a foot wrong.
It may not be enough for him to win in 2015. But if Trudeau becomes the effective opposition over the next two years, he is a good bet to return the Liberals to official opposition. That would be devastating to the New Democrats.
In that event, Trudeau will not only have saved the Liberal party from the death many had predicted. He will have restored the old two-party axis and consigned the NDP to its traditional, if esteemed, role as Canada’s conscience.
Andrew Cohen is a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University.
